About one and a half inches is a good thickness for grilled meat. At that thickness you can grill close to the coals—turning once without a lot of fussing with height adjustments. Just be careful not to place the grate so close to the coals that it burns through the wood, and you loose your food in the fire.
It’s hard to give any steadfast times for grilling meat. Much depends on the distance between the meat and the coals, as well as on the meat’s thickness and your own preference: rare, medium or (horrors) well done. With a one-and-a-half inch piece of meat, 5-8 minutes per side is a good rule.
Since dark meat (legs and thighs) cooks slower than white meat, it makes sense to section any birds you intend to grill. Fowl needs to be grilled very slowly, well above the coals, out of charring range. The ideal grilled fowl is succulent and delicately browned, unlike red meat, which can stand a thin char. As I mentioned before, the greatest tragedy to befall most grilled meat, and particularly fowl or small game like squirrel or rabbits, is overcooking because it results in dry, tough meat and a charred exterior.
A willow grill can easily be devised for large fish and fowl that require slow simmering to prevent moisture loss. (Photo: Richard Jamison)
To the contrary, ducks and beaver are quite fatty and create another problem. As they cook, melting fat causes flare ups that often catch fire and scorch your food—not to mention, ruin your grate. One way to prevent this is indirect cooking. When your coals have ashed over, push the center ones toward the perimeter of the fire pit, that way the food isn’t cooked right over the coals. By the way, beaver tails are a succulent treat roasted directly in the coals.
Fish causes its own problems because it is naturally tender and loose-textured. It cooks quickly, and as it begins to cook the flesh flakes. That helps little in the turning department, and the problem is generally compounded by skin sticking to the grate. Be patient and kind to fish. Don’t tug at it, and don’t keep flopping it around and poking it with a stick. All that will get you is a messy dinner. Most fish, unless very large and thick, only needs to be turned once.
If I have only one large fish, like salmon or bass, it’s easier to construct a basket from green willow as a cradle of sorts. That way I can turn the fish easily or move it around over the coals without disturbing it. And the leaves help protect the fish from burning, since it takes a little longer to cook than smaller varieties that are best cooked on a skewer. If we are lucky enough to catch several big fish, then it’s less trouble to build a large willow grate and cook them all at once.
Again, it is impossible to give precise cooking times because a lot hinges on the size of the fish and the distance the fish is cooked from the coals. In general, the standard rule for fish cookery applies: ten minutes per measured inch of thickness. As with all of life’s greater lessons, experience is the best teacher—with experience comes technique and refinement.
Stone Oven
The predecessor of baking was cooking animals in their skins. In Australia, when a wallaby or other animal is killed by the aborigines, they throw it whole on the fire in order to singe it. Once it is singed, it is opened and hot rocks put inside to cook it from the inside out.
Another good way to prepare meat or fish is to wrap them in leaves or grass and bake them in a stone oven. A stone oven is easy to build by forming a box of large flat rocks. You can even parch seeds or nuts on top of the flat roof of your oven at the same time you cook inside it. (I can’t stress enough the importance of being absolutely certain the rocks you use are fire-proven.)
Anything can be cooked in a stone oven, just remember it is dry heat, so you should wrap your food in leaves or other greenery to keep it moist. You regulate the temperature in a stone oven very simply by piling coals around the outside next to the oven walls for more heat and scraping them away to reduce heat.
On one of our treks we experimented with bread leavened with wild yeast gathered from aspen trees and Oregon grape berries. The yeast was used to leaven our ground-seed dough, which we baked very successfully in a stone oven. To top it off, we made a passable jam from wild thimble berries and huckleberries that grew in the area and drizzled it over the bread. It was a notable trip.
Clay also makes a handy cooking container that seals in juices and provides a serving dish as well. Clay-sealed food can be cooked in your stone oven, or directly in the coals of your fire.
Low-firing red clay is best when it is available because it can be molded, but plain old mud packed around the food works in a pinch.
First, knead the clay a little until it can be shaped and flattened. Then, line your makeshift roasting dish with edible leaves, such as dock or dandelion, and lay your meat or fish on the leaves. When you cook fish in clay, the skin forms a protective layer that peels away when you break the clay off, but I like to use leaves as a liner anyway to keep the food from burning and to provide moisture.
Be sure to know the identity of the greens you include in your clay dish: some plants, like sage and wild mustard, can be used sparingly to season meat and fowl but impart a bitter, unpalatable flavor to your food when they are steamed, and the resin from pine needles makes food taste like turpentine. This warning goes double for wild vegetable side dishes since poisonous hemlock is almost identical to wild carrot at some stages of growth, and death camas looks a lot like wild onion in the early Spring.
Next, seal the edges of your clay container carefully and place it into the oven, or bury it in the hot coals of your fire. Turning is not necessary and may even cause the seal to break, spilling juices.
Ash Cooking
As the coals of your fire burn down they naturally create the final phase of your cooking fire—a bed of ashes. To many people, ash cooking may seem a doubtful suggestion. And not surprisingly, what is the first reaction you hear when ashes blow into someone’s camp food? Loud protests, followed by a scramble to scoop the soot out before it contaminates the food, right? I have never understood how a student can wear the same underwear for fifteen days yet complain about a little dirt that gets into his or her food.
I suppose the reason most people act this way is that they don’t understand what ashes really are. Ashes are not dirt. Ash is the light, fluffy residue from burned wood. You may even be surprised to learn that food cooked in ashes is indeed more sanitary than food cooked in pans, because the fire kills the bacteria. The ashes are actually purified by the heat of the fire.
And, despite the way it may look, cooking in ashes does not affect the taste of your food—once it is cooked you can easily blow the ashes away, leaving food clean and free from soot.
During our primitive living treks, in times when animal and plant life was scarce, the staple of our diet was ash cakes. Each student was given a small portion of wheat dough mixed with a pinch of brown sugar to make ash cakes until they adjusted to the new wild foods diet. Ash cakes were later made from ground, roasted seeds and roots mixed with water and shaped into a flat patty or tortilla. They were cooked directly in the ashes and eaten like crackers, or packed with us for trail food. Incidentally, excellent “wild” flour can be made from ground, roasted cattail roots mixed with ground sunflower seeds and pinon nuts for flavor. When we could find them, we added wild berries or currants to make ash cake turnovers that were a real delicacy. Kids love them.
You also need to make some tongs for putting the food in and taking it out of the hot coals and ashes. These can easily be made by heating a green willow stick in the ashes until it becomes pliable, then bending it in the center to make a usable tool.